I read Where to From Here: A Path To Canadian Prosperity, by former Liberal Finance Minister Bill Morneau, this weekend. I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone else read it – it is bland, provides almost no new insight into the workings of the Trudeau government, and the “aw shucks can’t we all be more decent and moderate?” shtick gets old fast. But it has an important lesson for the post-secondary education sector. And that is: the sector counts for nothing in Ottawa right now.
In brief: one of the main themes of this book is that within the governing party there is a divide between “policy/substantive” Liberals who care about getting the big picture right and “image/communications” Liberals who just care about winning the 24-hour news cycle. In opposition they were united, but after about eighteen months in power (during which they enacted most of what was in their original manifesto) they split, with the latter group gradually gaining control. You don’t have to buy Morneau’s version of how all of this went down or even who within the party is on which side – broadly speaking, Morneau paints the PMO, after the departures of Cyrus Reporter and Gerry Butts, as the comms-obsessed bad guys and himself plus ministers with academic backgrounds like Jean-Yves Duclos and Jane Philpott as the virtuous execution-focused good guys – but the basic tale he is spinning is not without foundation.
Related to all this is the conceit that the “good guys” wish government could focus on things like productivity, growth and innovation (I will abbreviate this to PG&I). Leave aside the fact that Morneau did very little on this account while in government, a fact he ascribes partly to his own naivete and partly to those darn shallow comms-obsessed PMO-types. What’s important here is that this guy, who (in his own head) is the leader of the PG&I faction, does not mention universities or colleges once. Hell, in his recounting of the things he is most proud of in his budgets he doesn’t even mention the funding that came out of the Fundamental Science review, which was arguably the centrepiece of the 2018 budget. Doesn’t mention superclusters. Avoids use of the word innovation except to say in passing that Canada is not very good at it. Even on economic growth, his policy prescription is essentially “we should have more expert panels telling us what to do” (which is not necessarily wrong but betrays limited imagination and a surprising lack of personal insight). There’s an entire chapter on productivity, but for some reason it’s all about federal-provincial relations.
It has become a commonplace to suggest that Liberal inability to deal with long-term issues of productivity, competitiveness, scientific infrastructure, etc., are due to the frivolousness of the short-term comms-are-everything side of the house. But this is the guy who is supposedly in the serious wing of the party. And while it might be too much to say that he doesn’t care about these issues, it is certainly fair to say that they don’t seem to take up much space on his priority list. And if it is not taking up a lot of space in his head, it’s probably safe to say there is not a lot of Liberal Ottawa that is thinking about the problems of post-secondary education and the knowledge economy.
On its own, that might not be a terrible thing. You can still get a lot done in Ottawa if you have some senior public servants on your side, particularly in the Finance Department. But from what I’m hearing, that’s not really the case anymore. As I’ve been warning for a few years now, senior government officials have finally twigged that the whole argument that U-15 universities make about research – basically, i) buy shiny things for universities à ii) ? à iii) Innovation and growth! – is not very convincing. It worked for about 20 years as an argument, but no one is buying it anymore. Some new arguments are needed, but they require real change in the ways universities think and operate (basically: research needs to be reframed not as being about discovery leading to new inventions but rather as the way in which new highly-qualified scientific personnel are trained, but that means actually taking graduate curriculum more seriously than they currently do).
The need for new arguments is especially pressing, as we are few weeks out from a federal budget and from the last fiscal year for the post-Naylor Review planned growth in granting council budgets.
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If you were writing a book that was trying to make you look good, would you mention the superclusters?
For HQP, the best thing the government could do would be to give extra funding to the Tri-Agencies that is solely for the purpose of raising the graduate scholarship levels to something closer to a livable wage.
Absolutely. I’m in the life sciences, currently in the US, would love to come back to Canada later.
Graduate and postdoc salaries are shockingly low. Low NSERC and CIHR funding for academic research also means the best and brightest often leave for purely professional reasons, to work in the sort of elite labs that are very rare in Canada, regardless of salary. We generate little IP to commercialise or industrial R&D, so there are limited opportunities for those people to return to. I don’t think our leadership realise how bad it really is.
We have a decent crop of small biotechs and CROs, which we can be proud of. You can look at the biopharma scene and think it’s thriving (and after a devastating series of site closures a decade ago it has greatly recovered) but those companies rarely scale in Canada, which makes it something of an illusion on the economic growth front.
It unfortunately does seem that addressing our innovation and productivity gap has fallen off our national agenda. Recent budgets barely mention these things, as revealed, for example, by simple text searches for words like “innovation” and “productivity”. And if what Morneau says is true, the generalized indifference to this most important problem is even more widespread and deep-rooted than I had imagined.
This is more than unfortunate. Fifty years ago Canada had the second highest labour productivity among the G7 (behind only the US), today we have the second lowest (ahead only of Japan). We are the only G7 country with decreased R&D intensity since the turn of the millennium.
Unless we begin to address our innovation and productivity gap, our kids will have a lower standard of living than kids in peer countries. As Paul Krugman said, “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long-run it is almost everything.”
“research needs to be reframed not as being about discovery leading to new inventions but rather as the way in which new highly-qualified scientific personnel are trained, but that means actually taking graduate curriculum more seriously than they currently do”
It also means much more centrally controlling graduate curriculum, which seems incompatible with how science is and ought to be conducted.
More importantly, if the role of universities is producing “highly-qualified scientific personnel” like widgets, then that’s yet another reason to narrow the university to STEM, and become less broad-minded generally.
Instead, I think the argument should be that universities produce a highly-literate and highly-educated populace. That provides a potential for greater productivity, but it’s up to others to realize this potential with post-graduate diploma courses or, for that matter, industrial training.